


The Elephant Man

by katharinewrites



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-12
Updated: 2012-12-12
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:38:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katharinewrites/pseuds/katharinewrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zayn's got insomnia, Harry's a little bit of a twat, angst and feelings ensue. This was vaguely inspired by those near-infamous photos of Zayn and Harry partying in Sydney.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Elephant Man

When he is at home, sleep comes to Zayn like a lover that has missed him, gently laying over him, dialing down the cacophony in his head, and putting his weary body to rights again. On the road, sleep is a jealous lover who hates sharing him with waking life, a life spent performing in so many different cities, in so many different beds. It avoids him, giving in only when he is so exhausted that it bears down on him, snuffing out his existence for a few hours before retreating into the early hours of the morning when it realizes this room, this bed is not theirs.

The sight of hotel beds starts to make Zayn anxious. Their ornamented exteriors promise a lush haven for sleep, laced with dreams even more vivid and vibrant that the one he is currently living. But they invariably hold this promise out of reach. He lies awake in those beds for hours on end, contorting his body into the gestures of sleep hoping that maybe this angle, this side of the bed, will finally prompt slumber. It rarely does.

As the purple smudges under his eyes get deeper and puffier, his voice and attitude taking on a little too much edge, he looks for alternate roads to sleep—pacing, chain-smoking, alcohol, sex—but nothing works. They leave him frustrated and more weary than before.

The boys start to hate sharing a room with Zayn. His night-time routine--tossing, turning, pacing, chain-smoking, swigs from mini bar offerings, a furiously moving hand under the sheets--becomes something of a legend among them. They dutifully take turns being his roommate but there are resigned sighs when key cards are doled out and grumbled complaints of exhaustion the next morning.

On a lark, Zayn brings a hideous, glass elephant figurine from his bedroom at home. It was given to him by an ex-girlfriend in a puerile demonstration of affection, tacky in the way only a fifteen-year-old girl can be. He’s kept to remind himself of the time when life wasn’t about sold-out shows or long, snaking lines of fans desperate for his autograph and all the best parts of him. It is a feeble entreaty to sleep; you are welcome here, it says. He doesn’t expect much but that night sleep makes a reluctant entrance some time before 2am. It comes the next night and the night after that, slowly becoming more easily won. The boys are amused by the curious object but their relief that Zayn is acting less like a corpse halts any serious prying.

In every new city, in every room, he never sleeps without it perched on a bedside table, overseeing his sleep’s continual return with its trunk up in salute and enormous, sightless eyes. You are welcome here.

Yet the unwelcome is what most often finds its way in, destroying and redistributing what had been welcomed in the first place.

++

The unwelcome came in the form of bed bugs in Zayn and Harry’s hotel room. Sydney was to bring two nights of shows, an interminable amount of promotional photo shoots, and interviews. Instead Sydney brings a constellation of itchy, red welts. They wake up to a navy blue sky, when daylight is only a suggestion, scratching at their legs, arms and backs. Zayn sees a bug scuttle across his sheets and he bolts out of bed, pushing the sheets away from him like they are toxic matter.

“What the fuck!” he shouts, watching Harry in bed hold out an arm and slap at some still attached bug.

“Fucking bed bugs,” he says in his low, sleep-drunk voice before tearing out of the bed.

“What the fuck!” Zayn repeats, walking into the bathroom. He flicks on the light and stares at his reflection. His face appears unscathed, he notes thankfully, as he moves his head from side to side. His neck is slightly less fortunate with twin welts bookending his Adam’s apple. The worst of it appears when he lifts up his shirt. The patterns of bites wind up his torso and weave around to his back and arms. He could almost see the artistry—they almost competed in detail and scope with the tattoos on his forearms—of it if his skin wasn’t on fire, screaming to be scratched.

“Making sure you’re still the band’s great beauty?” Harry asks, coming up behind him in his last moments of inspection in the mirror. “You can’t still be this vain.”

When Harry teases the other boys he favors good-natured ribbing. But when it comes to Zayn, Harry’s quips are culled from the intersection of maliciousness and mockery, their edge blunted with a sly grin. It is how their interactions have always been—Harry muttering a snide remark, Zayn murmuring vulgarities in response. They do not hate each other persay, there is no time to hate each other in these extraordinary circumstances, but the current of amiable antagonism is always present beneath the surface.

“Fuck off,” Zayn says, dragging his nails angrily against a slew of bites along his shoulder. “Who do we tell about this ‘cause we’re not fucking staying here. What kind of shithole has bugs?”

Harry shrugs. “We’ll probably move to some other hotel tonight. Calm down.”

His eyes follow the movements of Zayn’s hand for a moment.

“Don’t scratch those too hard, they’ll scar,” he tsks.

Despite himself, Zayn pauses and looks down at his skin, worriedly. Harry chuckles and Zayn hates himself for looking every bit as vain as he’d been purported to be, however momentarily. He looks back up at Harry.

“Looks like they got your face. All this here around your mouth.” He reaches a hand to Harry’s face and runs his thumb along the row of bumps.

Harry’s eyes narrow. “No, those are spots,” he mumbles and swats Zayn’s hand away.

Zayn’s smile meanly, pleased with himself. He scratches at his thigh, and moves past Harry back toward the beds. The angry red glow of the alarm clock says it’s just after five in the morning. With their call time in an hour and he tries not to mourn these extra minutes he could have spent lost to his unconscious life. He goes to his luggage, fumbles through zippers and clothes for a cigarette. As he lights it, his eyes flicker to the elephant and he sees a bug lazily circling its base. It feels like the single greatest act of violence he’s seen in years.

++

The hotel is apologetic and fearful of bad press given its reputation so it promises to move Harry and Zayn to its most prestigious room. A particularly contrite hotel concierge offers connections to one of the city’s most exclusive escort agencies, off the record, of course. Management provides that last piece of information with a chuckle over speakerphone sometime before the third photo shoot of the day. The band had been in the midst of hair and makeup, each boy in a different stage of the evolutionary process toward glossy magazine glamour.

“What about our stuff?” Harry asks, leaning over Liam’s hand which reverently holds the phone up in the middle of their huddle.

“They’re treating everything with pesticide and got rid of anything unsalvageable according to the pest control they’re working with,” management assures. “Everything should be delivered to the room by the end of the night.”

Zayn thinks of the elephant briefly. “What’s considered unsalvageable?”

“Who knows? It sounded like your possessions were fine. Nothing’s irreplaceable, anyway. You know that,” management says. Zayn thinks it sounds like an allusion to the conversation they had all had when the band’s notoriety was just taking flight. Things might seem like it for a while, lads, but nothing, certainly no band is irreplaceable. Certainly no band that peddled in both popular music, a genre so ever-changing that six-week-old sounds are dated, and sexuality, where an ill-executed haircut could spell descent into irrelevancy.

He is about to protest, thoughts of enduring insomnia kick-starting his heart rate, when Louis interrupts.

“So if I bite Liam a few times will they upgrade us, too?” Louis asks. He chomps his teeth near Liam’s outstretched forearm a few times for dramatic effect even though management is unable to see. Liam snorts and shakes his head.

Management jokingly chides Louis, before running through the rest of the day’s itinerary—this last photoshoot, one last interview, the evening’s show and then they’re free until tomorrow afternoon’s flight to New Zealand.

When they hang up, Harry elbows Zayn in the ribs. “Your makeup and animal porn will be fine after all. Told you.”

Though he furrows his brow and mimes jacking off in response, Zayn wonders if it really will be fine after all; he wonders if anything has been just fine in the last two years.

++

The makeup artists work magic on the bites on his neck, camouflaging them so well that even Zayn’s discerning eyes can’t see them until he feels for them. What can’t be hidden, like the bites on his arms, is hidden by clothing. By the time the band steps on stage, Zayn looks his part, nothing physically amiss. But his perfectly coiffed and concealed exterior is at odds with his thoughts.

There hadn’t been time to return to the hotel before the show.

“There’s no time,” the boys’ handlers had said in the van as they shuttled from the last interview to the venue.

“I could go back alone, yeah? The rest of the lads could do sound check and get ready without me. I just need to check they made sure to get one of my things.”Zayn hated the desperate tinge to his voice.

“Absolutely no time,” he was told more firmly. That had been the end of it.

During the show he tries not to scratch himself, in part so as not to alarm the fans to anything out of the ordinary, in part because it reminds him of the elephant and the possibility it’s been disposed. Despite his efforts to remain placid, unaffected, he messes up a lyric and comes in too early on a few harmonies. Harry breezes through the show without incident. He watches Harry capitalize on the quasi-homoerotism the fans seem to love about them and is overly touchy with the other boys. It’s an excuse to rub against them, turn them into a human scratching post, when he needs some relief. Zayn tries not to be jealous of that confident mellow. Harry tries to rope him into a several hugs and each time Zayn side steps him, sending him orbiting toward Niall, his subtle rebellion.

When they finally step off the stage, Zayn spends the next half hour alone in his dressing room waiting for the show’s vital organs to disassemble. He idly doodles a face caught in mid-scream on the broad side of his hand with a pen. Zayn can’t tell if the doodle is autobiographical or a ham-fisted homage to Van Gogh. The call to van is a welcome interruption; the face had been taking on too many familiar attributes. 

On the way back to the hotel, Harry tries to rally the boys together for a night out but they protest claiming exhaustion. Zayn feigns deafness, hardly acknowledging Harry’s proposed plans. As they whiz through the city streets, Zayn stares out the window, feeling the streetlights flash patterns of chiaroscuro against his face. He thinks of the first time he had seen the elephant, cradled in thin fingers with chipped black nail polish.

“It’s not here,” Zayn says. “It’s not fucking here. Shit, it’s not fucking here!” He kneels in front of his suitcase, scavenging through the contents in it for the sixth time, hands groping everything in their path. Everything is too soft, too rigid, too boxy, too jagged, too wrong to be the elephant.

Zayn has torn through the entire room, an endeavor that left him winded given the sheer size of it. There was little doubt the room had deservedly earned its prestigious designation with its panoramic views of the city and harbor, private access elevator and Jacuzzi. It was truly a room for the highest echelon and in a different time, Zayn might have been humbled by the strange felicitousness of luck, how it had all come to pass to make this experience possible. But currently it is a prison. He has upended all of his belongings and the decorations in the room. He looks in the most unlikely places, desperate optimism leading him to think that maybe it is under this chair or inside this drawer or in this closet.

“You couldn’t wait until after we got pissed to trash this place?” Harry asks as he steps out of the bathroom, clad in a towel, holding one of the now half-empty complimentary bottles of whiskey. Rivulets of water drip from the ends of his hair onto his shoulders and sternum. A hazy cloud of steam follows him from the bathroom lends him an ethereal appearance though his body is at war with the beatific innocence of his face. His bites look ruddier, fierce shades of red, from the heat of his shower.

Harry looks around the room and takes another swig from the bottle, slightly cringing before he swallows. “What the fuck you looking for?”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Zayn says as he flips the suitcase over in a rage. It regurgitates clothes and shoes all over the floor. He picks up one shoe and flings it at a window with all the force in his body. It hurtles so far, so quickly he thinks it will break the glass and fly into the night, past the Harbour Bridge; that maybe there will be a UFO tonight in Sydney. It only lands with a thump and bounces to the floor.

“Did they lose your favorite hair pomade? Seriously, what the fuck?” Harry asks again as he walks to his own suitcase and rummages for clothes.

Zayn braces his arms against his folded legs and stares at the wall. He has checked every corner of the room at least three times, each time a little more panicked than the last. There is no sign of the elephant with his things or Harry’s. It’s gone. He considers the next month on the road without it, the late nights and sleeplessness and the sense of missing himself. The thoughts are enough to bring a brief sting of defeated tears.

“Did they lose your good luck charm?”

Harry’s words reorient him to the present and that he swallows back the tears and rising panic.

Zayn wants to say that he just lost the only thing that keeps him stable anymore but opening up to Harry seems inconceivable, too traitorous to Liam and Louis. He nods instead.

“Come out with me.” After a beat, in a quiet voice, Harry adds, “Maybe it will help you sleep better.”

Zayn turns to him, watches him pull the hem of a black cotton tee-shirt over his bite-ridden torso, and says, “Okay.”

Harry hands him the whiskey in response, a pagan offering to all of Zayn’s woe. Zayn’s fingers brush Harry’s damp ones as he takes it. He leads it to his lips, says “Goodbye,” to no one in particular and chugs.

++

Zayn and Harry with Paul in tow, end up at a club two streets away from the hotel, chosen mostly for its proximity and the line of beautiful women waiting to enter. When they arrive they’re ushered to the VIP section, a balcony overlooking the throbbing bodies on the dance floor below. Some lesser known Australian celebrities are already occupying the balcony and make a scene when the boys are let through the rope barrier. Their complaints are quieted when the bouncer hands them a tiny Ziploc bag, all white snow and racing thoughts inside of it. Though they play nice for the bouncer’s sake they coldly stare at the boys and whisper to one another in with the snobbery of those whose relatively little social currency is threatened.

The owner, a brassy sexagenarian with a Peter Pan glint in his eye, presents the boys with two bottles of champagne. Harry immediately takes possession of one and chugs straight from the bottle, no preamble with a champagne flute. Zayn follows his lead. The bubbles burst and snap over his tongue and in his throat. 

Harry leans over the balcony, eyes scanning the dancing mass below for appropriately sexy girls. When a waitress comes over to check in on them, Harry says something in her ear, a hand braced on her waist as she leans in. She shakes her head with a knowing smile when she understands the message and wanders off. Minutes later, a parade of stilettos, tight dresses and false lashes enter the VIP section.

“See you at the end of the night then, mate,” Harry says before swaggering off to a pair of tall blondes with coquettish, down-turned eyes.

Zayn works on the last swigs of his champagne, reveling in the slow, sweet buzz that coils through his mind. He feels calm. It won’t be long before they leave and he’s confronted with the sleepless toil of work and what exactly he’s chosen to do with his life at so tender an age but for now, he will let friendly, fun, fucked up and fucked out Zayn free.

He raises his arms above his head and yells, “YOLO motherfuckers!”

When Zayn’s drunk enough to regard is the state of his cock with singular interest, he looks through Harry’s selection. They are Harry’s typical crop, leggy and loud, fully cognizant of their beauty. Zayn has dabbled in this sort of female company before. They are always a good experience, easy and familiar, but Zayn needs something different tonight. He scratches near under his ribs and looks into the undulating crowd downstairs. It is impossible to see anyone’s face clearly; Zayn is impressed by the younger boy’s ability to cull from the mostly faceless crowd.

He stands away from the edge of the balcony and looks for the waitress as the music grinds into staccato bass beat. The strobe lights rapidly blink in time to the music, hindering his search. His eyes lock with a girl’s across the way. With movements that seem jerky, disjointed they have shortened the distance between each other. The lights settle into the normal flashes and up close he can see she is a redhead. It has been a while since he has fucked a redhead.

He had previously decided it was important to cycle through physical attributes to ward off his increasing boredom with the act. The sameness of it all had set in after the third month on tour when a week of shows in new cities had yielded conquests that all felt exactly identical—nameless, young, vaguely satisfying. He thought that by sampling every alluring size and shape of eyes, lips, breasts, sex would be comforting again. He needs it to be, especially tonight. Tonight, he needs her to be mother, lover, savior.

She is star struck and skittish when he approaches her. “I know you. You’re from that band aren’t you?” she says leaning into his ear before he even says anything to her. He nods and they settle into an easy, flirty banter that makes him forget about beds and bugs and elephants. He thinks of inviting this girl back but fears the bites will scare her off. Then he remembers that most fans don’t want his love, they just want the illusion of him. He can be an illusion in a dark, club bathroom with just his fly undone.

She tells him her name, but a minute later all he can remember about it is that it was three-syllables long. When her drink runs low he orders her another and one for himself. By the middle of her second drink their hands find reasons to make contact with the other’s body, excuses to linger. She leans into him, swaying to the beat of the music, arms laced around his neck. He cradles her waist in one arm swaying with her while his other hand brushes up and down the side of her body.

“Are you really him?” she asks over and over in the crook of neck.

Zayn releases her, full of drunken bravado, and rolls up the sleeve of his shirt to expose his tattoos. “If I’m not him we have the same fucking tattoos.”

He realizes his mistake when her eyes widen. “What happened to your arm?” 

Zayn looks down at his ravaged arm and pulls it out of sight. “I have to go.”

Zayn pushes through a kissing couple, their lips making a smacking sound as they come apart. His only thought is go, go, go, go. He looks for Harry all over the balcony, bumping into hands with drinks in them, feeling a growing dampness on his shirt, stumbling onto shoes, enduring epithets hurled at him by annoyed club-goers. He feels like a pinball in the sea of bodies, bumped one way then the next, his mind too dulled to right the balance checks and overshot movements. An elbow shoots out, disembodied by the dark lights and Zayn can’t find his feet. He goes down, knees connecting with the floor. Before he can even process his fall, a strong arm grabs him under his shoulder and sets him upright. Paul.

Paul starts to say something but Zayn croaks out, “Harry."

He nods and they battle through the crowd together, Zayn holding onto Paul’s back like he is a riot shield in all of this vibrating panic.

++

He finds Harry after twenty minutes of searching, holed up with the DJ in the booth laughing about something. It is so dark in this area of the club that Zayn can only tell his search is over by the sound of Harry’s laugh. It is clear and distinct over the near-deafening music that is rising, fumbling toward something. The darkness in the booth is pierced by the glow from the DJ’s laptop lending the pair a spectral glow.

“We need to go,” Zayn yells at Harry from the door.

“Now?” the DJ asks. He looks over his shoulder from the deck before adjusting a nob. “He can’t go now, mate. The song is about to come!”

A moment later, the frantic building of the music ends in an orgasmic eruption of skittering bass thumps and frenzied screeches. The strobe lights flicker rapidly again following the music’s dive into chaos. Harry’s eyes alight at the song’s discord, eyes full of awe like he’s listening to music for the first time.

Zayn moves into the booth and yanks Harry’s arm, violently pulling him toward the door. “Now.”

Harry yanks his arm back. “Fuck off! Weren’t you about to go fuck that redhead?”

He starts to walk back to into the booth but Zayn shoves him back against the door, stares into his glassy eyes. “Please.”

“So you couldn’t get one up? Are you embarrassed to run into her again?”

The smugness of Harry’s tone and the taunt in his eyes causes Zayn to throw his weight against him, pinning him flat against the door, their bodies pressed against each other “Please!” he says again.

The twitching lights illuminate snatches of the boys’ visages, a mouth, the line of a nose, part of an eye, before there is a burst solitary bright light that lays everyone and everything in the club bare.

Harry searches Zayn’s face in this moment and his expression loses most of its jovial, drunken complacency, morphs into a mask of concern.

“Okay,” he says when the darkness suddenly cloaks them again. Okay.

He lets Zayn lead him out of the club by the hand, fingers laced together, with Paul taking the front. They are jostled by mindless, gyrating dancers and errant club-goers journeying through the throng toward the bar but they never release each other. Harry strokes the back of Zayn’s hand with his thumb twice, once in apology, once in solidarity just before the cool April air baptizes the sins of this failed attempt at hedonism.

++

“Will you be all right?” Harry asks in the alleyway after they have set some distance between themselves and the babel of the club. Harry’s steps are wide set and his balance sways with every few steps.

When Zayn doesn’t answer Harry tries again but the words trip over themselves, flipped into the wrong order by his drunken tongue. He smiles at their folly.

Zayn only limps along; his right knee is sore from the fall. He concentrates on a figure up ahead whose path has mirrored theirs too closely.

“This brooding act isn’t working for me and…fuck I have to piss,” Harry says. He whirls around suddenly scanning the alley for a suitable makeshift toilet, one hand already unzipping his pants. Zayn sees a flash up ahead.

“You better not get your cock out, yeah? Or you’ll see it all over the internet tomorrow,” Zayn says, finally and inclines his head toward the figure a few yards away from them, a photographer. They had been fortunate enough not to run into the paparazzi on their way to the club but their whereabouts had likely been tipped off by someone at the club as they left.

“Oh fuck me,” Harry whines and starts walking again, increasing the length of his strides. His loping gait zigzags causing him to regularly careen into Zayn’s shoulders. Zayn bears it because it soothes an itch on his arm and because it’s all he can do anymore, bear it.

Paul walks in front and shields what he can of them, holding up a hand like he’s directing traffic.

The alleyway behind the hotel is home to a row of dumpsters, each stacked high with the effluvia of human life. Next to one dumpster are the two mattresses, stacked against one another.

“I bet those are our beds,” Harry says, pointing at them.

Zayn stares at the mattresses as they approach. They look strange outside of the context of a bedroom. The scene isn’t set for their existence, the timing right but the environment all wrong. It is a cognitive dissonance that is almost sobering. These deeply private objects, hidden behind closed doors, now out in the world like shipwrecked souls in this sea of trash. Zayn feels something close to kinship with these beds.

++

In the hotel lobby Paul spends a moment talking Harry out of urinating into one of the potted plants near the private elevator bank. As soon as he turns his back to go to his own room, Harry does it anyway, one eye closed, swaying to his toes and back to his heels.

Zayn lights a cigarette, ignoring the no smoking placard because fuck it, he’s famous and he can. Dread incrementally takes over his thoughts. He barely realizes the elevator arrives until Harry stumbles into it. The elevator doors close, each boy in an opposite corner, but it doesn’t move. Zayn realizes after a second no one hit the button to go up. Harry leans against the elevator wall, head down, an absent smile on his face. For a moment the only sounds are the dings as another floor passes by and the suck and crackle of Zayn’s cigarette as he takes another drag.

Harry leans away from the wall, arches his back and rolls his shoulders. His arms come up behind his back, bent at awkward angles, reaching at a corner of himself he can’t reach. He realigns his arms, tries a different approach but gives up.

“Help?” He turns away from the other boy, baring his back.

Zayn takes another drag at his cigarette, exhales, and slots it between his pursed lips to free his hands.

He rakes his fingers over the spot that was just out Harry’s reach with short, rapid movements. “Here was it?” he mumbles, the cigarette bobbing on every syllable.

“There, yeah,” Harry says like a prayer. He wilts into Zayn’s ministrations, tension fleeing his shoulders and neck. “Shit, go under?”

Zayn slips his hand up under Harry’s shirt, the pads of his fingertips brushing skin, finding other welts littered like landmines on his back.

“Yeah there,” Harry sighs. He twists his head, chin meeting his right shoulder, while Zayn works under his shirt. In profile, Zayn can see Harry’s eyes are closed, his rose-tinged lips are slightly parted, and a scarlet flush from the alcohol stains his cheekbones. They have all seen each other in repose at some time or another, as they have seen each other eat, laugh and cry, but this feels intimate. A wordless sound reverberates from Harry’s mouth and suddenly it feels like the elevator has gone off too fast and he left his stomach in the lobby. When Harry opens his eyes and slants a glance at him, Zayn is relieved to hear the final ding and see the elevator doors open.

Zayn slides his hand out, reaches for his cigarette and limps out.

++

Harry does a cursory check of his bed for any signs of multi-legged vampires before he flops onto it, fully clothed. Zayn doesn’t even look at his bed—it’s a mere decoration at this point, a formality not an actually piece of furniture. Sobriety is slowly starting to wheedle its way back into Zayn’s consciousness, tiring him physically but not enough to pull him under.

He hobbles toward a window and stares at all the vastness below them. The city is bestial below. The Opera House is a lit up like a prehistoric bird of paradise, the bridge is leonine presiding, over the land and every whizzing pair of headlights like scampering prey. He wonders if every city vista will look like wildlife, mocking him. Zayn lights another cigarette and settles into one of the couches by the window, eyes still plastered to the view.

“You ever wonder if this is too much for you to handle?” he asks after a while. Harry’s breathing is deep and rhythmic now, so it surprises him when he gets a response.

“Sometimes.”Harry clears the trace of sleep from his voice. “But I don’t dwell on it too long.”

Zayn smirks. “I wish I knew how to do that.”

Harry doesn’t say anything and they settle into silence again.

The lamp on the night stand closest to Harry’s bed casts a glare on the window. In it Zayn can see part of the room, himself, reflected. It is a perfectly melancholic image, an ode to the loneliness of insomnia, one he’s already weary of. He goes toward the bed to turn out the lamp. As his hand inches toward the switch, Harry grabs his wrist.

“Go to bed, Zayn.” Harry’s eyes are sharp and alert in contrast to the slack shape of body on the mattress.

Zayn smiles a miserable smile, lips curling in toward his teeth, and shakes his head. “I can’t.”

“Is this about the…?” Harry doesn’t finish his question. He sits upright, opens the nightstand drawer and unearths a pen. It bears the hotel logo, in garish block lettering.

“Draw it,” he commands, uncapping the pen and thrusting it at the other boy. “It’s not here anymore so just draw it so you can go to sleep.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“No but you’re always better after you’ve drawn something.”

Zayn takes the pen reluctantly, scratches an irritated row of bites on his forearms. “Where?”

Harry searches around for paper but the drawer is empty except for a room service menu and an archaic bible. Its presence is peculiar among the contemporary sophistication of the room. He looks for a blank page in it but its pages are crinkled and brittle, threatening to fall out with the barest turn. Harry replaces it gingerly then takes a look around the room.

“Here,” he taps his knuckles behind him, on the expanse of white wall behind the bed frame.

Zayn hesitates.

“Their shitty room gave us these,” Harry said, holding up a bitten arm. “It’s an even trade.”

Zayn kicks off his boots and climbs onto the bed. He stands in front of the wall, plotting where to lay the pen. The whiteness and emptiness is daunting in the same way a blank page is before he sets a line to it, claims his dominance with ink. He feels the bed sink and shift under him as Harry reverses his positioning to watch.

Zayn leans into the wall and starts to draw the elephant but it feels like a pointless endeavor so he starts over. It’s mostly a suggestion of lines, a stylized conceptualization, but it is enough to feel vaguely comforting. If Harry recognizes it he doesn’t say anything derisive, he doesn’t say anything at all, only watching the strokes of the pen.

“Sleep,” Harry tells Zayn when he replaces the pen cap and admires his work. He raises the corner of the blankets and sheets in invitation.

Zayn bends his knees, favoring one side, and sinks down next to Harry. Under the covers, he sheds his clothes, deposits them in a heap on the ground next to the bed. The heat of the sheets warm parts of him he hadn’t realized were cold.

++

Zayn’s insomnia isn’t so easily cured. He gives up aspirations of an immediate departure into sleep within a half hour. He rotates onto his back, his side sore from the weight of his body. He stares at the ceiling and when it proves to be an uninteresting mix of speckled crème paint and recessed lights, he turns head toward Harry. It is not the first time he has ever taken him in with more than passing observations but it has been the first time he is allowed to do it unquestioned. He memorizes the wide spacing of his eyes, the shape of his philtrum, the wave pattern of his hair, and stores away the images like snapshots for later. Zayn assures himself it’s for a painting he’s going to make of him, of all the boys to commemorate this time in their life.

He notices Harry’s eyelashes start to flutter and he closes his own, pretending to be asleep. In a while he opens his eyes again, takes Harry in a little longer, again shuts them again when he feels he might be caught. It goes on like this for a while, the looking and the pretending.

The last time he shuts his eyes Harry’s hand comes up, meanders down the length of one arm. Zayn doesn’t open his eyes and concentrates on the fingers circling each welt then moving to the next. The action seems to awaken them. Soon they are a chorus of near-painful itches but he doesn’t move but he doesn’t give into the urge to scratch. 

“You would draw that,” Harry says after a minute of the torturous touches, inclining his head in the direction of the wall. “You’re the insecure one.”

Zayn’s eyes flip open. It is the impassive face like Harry had just mentioned a rote fact, his multiplication tables or the alphabet, that does him in.

He thrashes against him, combining a thrust from his arms and a kick, sending Harry nearly falling off the bed.

Harry vaults from the edge of the bed and covers Zayn’s body with his own. There is a struggle, arms and legs tangling in the power play and then there is a furious contact of lips. They pause at the shock of it and then the fitting together of mouths again. It doesn’t last long enough to make a strong impression between their legs but it makes their breathing erratic all the same.

When they separate, Zayn starts but Harry kisses the question off his lips, licks interrogatives away with his tongue. Zayn shivers away from him, turns onto his side, faces away from what just transpired. Harry follows him a second later, turning away wordlessly.

They lie pressed with their backs together under Zayn’s sketch of his childhood home, contemplating the pros and cons of so many unrequited dreams.


End file.
